A Bit Of Nostalgia My Mentor, My Friend, Tom
By Al Cronkrite The Covenant News ~ January 05, 2009
Many successful people have had mentors. They are often religious leaders, parents, teachers, coaches, or business associates. Mine was different.
For those saved from hopeless addiction the advent becomes a permanent defining moment. It is as if life began at that transition and what went before was but a terrible nightmare.
I am now in my eightieth year but the life I was intended to live began a scant forty-six years ago. Evidence of the reality of my nightmare still remains as a perennial reminder of past perversion.
During the early years of my recovery I was privileged to have been exposed to a man whose practical wisdom shaped the ensuing time. He was at once tough, humorous, and serious. He had a way of getting at uncomfortable truth that was a curse to some but a blessing to me. Tom is gone now. My only physical reminders of him are a couple of faded photographs of his self-conscious, lopsided smile that are a part of a photomontage on our living room wall.
When a mile long train, loaded with contraband, running too fast on an unstable track, careens off the rails, the jumble of railcars and their piles of content are similar to the wreckage that results from an insane human life that is suddenly stopped. The true cargo is revealed as refuse. It is exposed in the wreckage and the process of removing it, repairing the platform and setting the individual back on track is difficult and time consuming. Though the track is the prime problem the long line of wreckage must be removed before the track can be repaired. Once the twisted wreckage is removed and the contraband discarded the engine with truth filled rail cars can be reset on properly repaired rails.
My friend Tom was the boss of the crew that helped get my train back on track.
He was raised in an Irish immigrant family in a small New England town. I didn’t know much about his childhood but he told me they were poor and that he and his siblings (a brother and sister) would steal chunks of coal from railroad cars to heat their home. I remember, too, that he grew up in the ice box age and worked delivering heavy cakes of ice to residences and businesses, that he was an unusually talented athlete, that he had been married and divorced, and that he was afraid to drive a car.
I met Tom at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in 1963. I had been living without drinking for a few months and he had been sober for fifteen years. He remembered the roots of A. A. in his area; how a sober alcoholic had traveled a hundred miles to bring the first meeting.
Tom was a unionized steam fitter. Though the union was responsible for his liberal earnings he denounced it because he felt the big hourly rates were not always warranted by the work being produced. He never remarried and when lay offs came he volunteered allowing men with families to continue to work. He lived alone in a rented room and the surplus money he earned went to his children.
His brother had a big job and was well known in the town where they lived and Tom often told the story of lying in a drunken stupor by the sidewalk where his brother and family passed on the way to church. One Sunday morning his brother saw him and said, “You drunken S.O.B. Why don’t you go jump off the bridge and do the town a favor?” Tom thought, “I’ll show him!” He got up off the ground walked down to the middle of the bridge and jumped off. In the water, drowning was not comfortable so he swam as hard as he could toward shore.
Breaking the bubbles of self appointed A. A. leaders was one of Tom’s favorite occupations. He was convinced that addiction was caused by a permanent flaw in the individual. This theory was onerous to those who saw themselves as destined to bring the Steps to the non-addicted world. They did not like Tom and the feeling was mutual.
Those who got involved in A. A. government, the VIP set, was another thorn in Tom’s side. They carried briefcases and officiated at meetings. They were sobriety teachers and often studied to be counselors. Tom would quietly point out that the A. A. mission was not to counsel but to carry the message and time spent at dinners, dances, conventions, and other functions was time wasted.
He was fiercely independent. He was my mentor and my friend but he never attempted to control my life. Though he never learned to drive and I often drove him to meetings and to other destinations, if I was not available he walked – sometimes as far as twenty miles each way. He believed it was best to learn to live as normally as possible without depending on the advice of others. It was his opinion that sober alcoholics often talked wisdom but lived in chaos and he found and pointed out ample evidence to support his theory.
Tom lived a very simple life. It was not without problems but he kept it simple. Since he lived in a single rented room he did not cook and ate most of his meals in restaurants. We often ate together and frequently in the restaurant he would point to single, sober alcoholic invariably alone. He believed loneliness was a continuing problem.
Tom never spoke about his athletic achievements but others told me he could have been a professional athlete. He was one of the best baseball pitchers in the memory of many of his hometown sports fans. He was a football star when they wore leather caps. Outstanding on ice skates, he excelled at any kind of athletics. Those close to him noted that he always carried a pint of whiskey or had one at his disposal.
He and his wife were Irish Catholic but his wife could not live with the constant bouts of drunkenness, the visits to the local jail, and the general uncertainty and upset that accompanies living with a drunkard. She divorced him. Without his wife Tom became a homeless drunk. He drank Sterno, radiator alcohol, anything that would blunt reality. One bitter cold winter he lived in a cardboard box at the city dump.
His attraction to the opposite sex never wavered. He said his wife told him the only times he was happy was when he was drunk or having intercourse. He was in his sixties when he tried to impress one of his paramours with his ability on the ice. During a successful spin he fell on his hip. He was a tough guy. It hurt but he endured the pain. Three weeks went by and still in pain he decided to visit the doctor. The doctor examined his hip and told him it had been broken but was healing nicely. He sent Tom a bill for $350.00. Tom was irate.
Tom’s love affairs were a regular source of upset. He was either fighting with the woman or with her family. The family of one of his longtime companions was upset because he would not marry her. One of his female friends had spent considerable time in a mental institution but owned a home and enough ground for Tom to plant a garden. Tom decided she needed a garden and her protests did very little good – she got a garden whether she liked it or not. Tom said she would often give her family a detailed account of their sexual activities.
Tom’s affairs and the upset they created taught me the need to find a good wife which by the Grace of God I did.
Families do not soon forget the behavior of alcoholic members. Tom’s spinster sister helped him clean, did his laundry, and gave him continual unsolicited advice. One of her advisories involved an active drinker named Jack. Jack had been in and out of A. A. for several years. He was an aristocratic looking gentleman who had been able to live in a constant state of mild alcoholic euphoria by becoming a gigolo. Jack hadn’t worked in years but he was enough of a trophy that several different women were willing to keep him for long periods of time. Seeing him on a street corner one day Tom’s sister pointed him out and asked Tom why he couldn’t be more like that “good looking gentleman”.
Some years later at an A. A. meeting Jack met a divorced woman from a well known family. They became close, Jack stopped drinking, they married and we all became good friends.
When Tom came to A. A. he had been living on the streets for many months. For a short period of time he slept in a car owned by a member. Then another member rented him a room. In the room for the first few nights, not used to a bed, Tom slept on the floor.
With his new sobriety he helped his ex-wife and his children. They never remarried but sober and coherent he was summoned to her deathbed.
Into his eighties Tom was an avid gardener. He had a gift for raising productive plants in poor soil and could toil for several hours bent over in the hot sun. His attendance at A. A. meetings slacked off but he remained sober. He shared vegetables with his children and his neighbors.
He had moved into a public housing project closer to his son and one day they found him wandering through the hall naked and confused.
He lived out his remaining years in a locked Alzheimer ward. His last coherent words to me were, “I am losing my mind.” I said, “You’re doing the best you can.” - He was.
Tom was God’s gift to me. He was not a great man by worldly standards but he was a great man to me. We had moved away before he died and I was not notified of his funeral. He has been gone now for more than a decade. I miss him.